Help for searching this site

We marked the start of 2024 by retiring our charming site search engine. Its developers gave up on it some time ago...

For the moment we are recommending that you search using DuckDuckGo - because it respects your privacy. That in turn means that we do not have to ask your permission to make it set a bunch of cookies on your computer.

General tips

As with all internet searches, you still do not generally want to enter words that describe a page, or words that it might be catalogued under in a library. You want to enter words that will appear in the page that you want to read. Free-association may help. DuckDuckGo, however, is following more famous search engines in increasingly serving up what it "thinks" you mean, rather than what you literally asked for.

Searches are not case-sensitive. That is, searches for "BBC", "bbc" and indeed "BbC" will produce exactly the same results.

If you run out of space in the search box, keep typing. Your text will move along.

Put + before words that you definitely want to appear in the pages you get; and - before words that you want not to appear in them. (The character - is a hyphen, standing in for a minus sign.)

You can still search for exact phrases by putting them in quotes: "unfair contract" or, to follow the theme we developed in olden times (below) "greasy spoon".

If your "search term" is long, search engines will simply ignore the end of it. They seem to cope with phrases up to 20 words or so.

What we have lost

Sadly, there is no longer any public search engine that supports "Boolean algebra".

That is the name for the way computers deal with questions. It's named after George Boole (1815-1864), who invented a system of algebra that works on the logical values "true" and "false" rather than on numbers, using or and and instead of + and ÷.

Boolean searches let you ask for things like "greasy spoon" AND "proper coffee" or "greasy spoon" NOT bacon NOT prawns.

You could search for bacon and (eggs or beans) The () parentheses told proper search engines which bit to deal with first. This would have searched for all the pages that contain the word "eggs" plus all those that contain the word "beans" - and then it narrowed that list down to those that also contain the word "bacon". (Without the parentheses, you'd probably see results for (bacon and eggs) or beans - which is quite different. Work it out.)

Enough reminiscing... Now, to have this much power - according to this guide - you need to spend a lot to get a LexisNexis account to search newspaper archived and court judgments .